Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @03:19PM
from the shaking-the-tree-to-see-what-falls-out dept.

AaxelB writes "A study described in the New York Times rethinks mammalian evolution. Specifically, that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs had relatively little impact on mammals and that the steps in mammals' evolution happened well before and long after the dinosaurs' death."

"...Dinosaurs were created on day 6 of the creation week approximately 6,000 years ago, along with other land animals, and therefore co-existed with humans."

"...Dinosaurs lived in harmony with other animals, (probably including in the Garden of Eden) eating only plants;" and "pairs of each dinosaur kind were taken onto Noah's Ark during the Great Flood and were preserved from drowning."

"Dinosaur bones originated during the mass killing of the Flood;" and "some descendants of those dinosaurs taken aboard the Ark still roam the earth today."

Easy. Elephants, hippos, alligators, lions, polar bears, and kitty cats were the food for the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs made their way through the dragons, unicorns, hobbits and fairies by the time the flood ended and the rest were spared. They're living on a ranch in Montana now.

The biblical record states that the animals come to Noah. It wouldn't be cheating if all those animals were babies or at least very young. There is nothing that says they had to be fully grown. Such little animals would eat much less and eventually grow up to reproduce.

The Noachian flood is falsifiable on so many different levels - it really only takes a few minutes of unbiased thinking.

I'm not a creationist here, but there is a theory that a significant flood of the Black Sea [wikipedia.org] happened around 5600 BC. This would would have likely wiped out many settlements in the affected areas and have been recorded by the sirvivors as a significant event. While this is not a flood of truly global scale, it is a likely source for the Noah story.

I don't find that flood story explanation is that compelling. There certainly was a local flood in the area. Most civilizations tend to settle next to water and water tends to have floods. However, beyond this I see little to no evidence that there was or even needs to be a historical source for a literary myth. Noah's Ark is almost certainly a rehashing of the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Sumerians and Babylonians. It is entirely possible that idea of a major flood comes from such an event. It is highly sugg

Just a quick question, since you seem to have a ready answer--When you say that these events are "not true," do you mean that it's not true in the sense that the literalists think it IS true? Ie, you think it is a story or a myth or something, but definately not literally true?

Or, do you take a more extreme position that absolutely nothing in the stories is true?I'm thinking of Aesop's fables, where the story is almost certainly made up (as I do not know any talking foxes who desire grapes) and yet describ

The dieties in the old testament are not the all-powerful, all-knowing Diety in the new testament. The god in the old (who admits he is actually one among many in the first commandment through forbidding of the worship of the others) might be significantly more powerful than a mere human, and immortal to boot, but not nearly as "perfect" as the God in the new. Attempts to reconcile the two would only result in numerous logical inconsistencies. Why, for example, would an omniscient diety need to test believe

Most people, you being one, criticize the Bible, having never read it, let alone carefully studied it with an open mind. If you had, you would read passages like:

Sure like:

Deuteronomy"As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every

Oddly enough, in the story, after God drowns everything for being completely evil. Man, woman, child, infant, fetus... all dead. God feels really really bad about it. Apparently he didn't think it through or know what was going to happen so in Genesis 9:9-13 he makes rainbows exist as a way to say, "I'm really sorry and will never do it again." -- However, rainbows are produced by a fairly trivial byproduct of the diffusion of white light through a medium. This is roughly why we have a blue sky. The light from the sun is diffused and the blue light is diffused more than the other colors. However, if this diffusion didn't exist before God screwed up by drowning everybody and everything (seems like a better solution than later sacrificing Himself to Himself to pay Himself for the debt mankind owes to Him and worse than just not keeping a grudge against people who didn't do anything wrong but somehow get the blame for some other mythological couple doing something wrong without the facilities to tell right from wrong), what color was the sky?

Just how did these baby polar bears, kola bears, blind cave fish and blind mole rats make the oceanic journey and arrive in the Middle East.

Magic.

Oh, you don't believe in magic? Then you don't need any more reason to disbelieve that a magical being caused a worldwide flood, but you'll need harder questions than those to convince people who do believe in magic that it doesn't really exist.

Sorry for the comment abuse, but I just had to post this comment from youtube:

evilc27 (2 hours ago)
The fact that we are born babies and evolve into people is evidence enough to dispel the myth of evolution. If we were born monkeys, then there would be billions of monkeys in the world as there are billions of people. This does not equate. People have called me stupid for expressing my facts, but I am far from stupid. I took an IQ test at my church school, and I scored 95. You cannot get more than 100% and so I am in the top 5% of the smartest people in the world. chew on that disbelievers.

I had thought this point was actually a point of disagreement between Gould and Dawkins, with Dawkins pointing out that the cambrian explosion wasn't as sudden as Gould had pointed out.
I think this particular point was discussed in Bryson's "A Brief History of Nearly Everything". I didn't think anyone still held this viewpoint about mammalian evolution anymore.

What the hell does the cambrian explosion have to do with mammalian evolution? There's a several hundred million year time span between the two, and that's just to the beginning of the mammal line with the synapsids like dimetrodon. Add another hundred million or two before we get to anything that most people would consider mammalian.

Evolution rate is determined (at the upper limit) by the gene change rate per generation. Whether that's "slow" or "fast" depends on how long a generation is and what niches are available for variant offspring to be more viable in than their progenitors. That latter is why we tend to see rapid speciation some recovery time after extinction events: a lot of niches are left empty by extinct species. (Obviously, though, those niches were temporarily absent or the previous occupiers wouldn't have gone exinct

If by *all* appearances something appears fully mature, is it? What if it was merely created to look that way so that it would be functional immediately, rather than waiting for however long it takes to be viable.

Of course, the anti-creationist might be inclined to criticize such a remark with the reflection that if that were so with the universe, how would we know that everything was not, for example, merely created yesterday, complete with all apparent hist

The Theory of evolution is a materialist explanation of the history of life on earth. Despite being the scientific standard, in the United States, there are a significant number of lay people who do not accept evolution. According to a CBS poll, only 13% of American adults believe humans evolved without divine guidance.

A CBS survey said there's no evolution! If 87% of people say there's no evolution then this article is a sham sir!

Back on-topic, what interests me is:

But the researchers conceded that much more research would be required to explain the delayed rise of present-day mammals.

If it wasn't the dinosaurs stopping the evolution of mammals (i.e. dinosaurs dominating the habitat), then what did? Could it be that the available habitats were just better suited to dinosaurs vs. mammals? That's the first thing that springs to mind (although am no paleontologist). As ever with this sort of thing, the finding raises more questions than it answers!

Well, I may be corrected on this but I'll say it anyway since it's what I was taught in college. The median world temp around the peek of the dinosaurs was very high, somewhere around 130 to 140 degrees and there was a much larger amount of CO2 in the air. I would have assumed that as this changed mammals were given their chance at the top of the food chain.

I always interpreted mammalian evolution to be parallel with climate change. I suspect however many people would disagree.

The higher temperature of the Cretaceous has already been referred to. Estimates suggest that at the beginning of the Cretaceous, the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) was around 20C (about 5 hotter than today's value of 15C), and was about the same at the period's end - but peaked to a high of 25C in the Upper Cretaceous.

According to a CBS poll, only 13% of American adults believe humans evolved without divine guidance.

A CBS survey said there's no evolution! If 87% of people say there's no evolution then this article is a sham sir!

There is no 87% saying there's no evolution. They are saying there's no MATERIALISTIC evolution. It's probably the 87% of us who believe that life itself has divine guidance. Whether evolution or anything else is random/mechanical or divine-influenced is a purely philosophical one, not a scien

There is obviously no evidence that the mutations which gave rise to speciations were "random" and not in some way directed, naturally or supernaturally, or otherwise forced in some particular direction.

"Obvious" if you ignore pretty much all work in molecular genetics at least since Watson and Crick.

Once we arrive at a better understanding of how DNA works, perhaps it will be possible to form mathematical models to determine whether or not the "random mutation" theory is feasible.

You mean, the way bioinformaticists and statistical geneticists do all the time, right now, and have been for years?

Maybe it's only feasible during intermittant radiation events that decimate populations by causing widespread mutations, leaving a few individuals with improvements, who go on to reproduce and build up populations again. Maybe it's not possible at all.

Do you have any data, at all, that would support either one of these hypotheses? Or are you just cut'n'pasting from some ID site somewhere?

There is obviously no evidence that the mutations which gave rise to speciations were "random" and not in some way directed, naturally or supernaturally, or otherwise forced in some particular direction.

Well, apparently you have your own definition about what is obvious. An *overwhelming* amount of evidence points to genetic mutations being random. Your claims have no scientific basis. None whatsoever. What you are saying is pure speculation, with absolutely no proof to back it up. Saying "sometime

Nope. It's not satire. It was created by Andrew Schlafly, son of arch-conservative anti-femininst Phillys Schlafly [wikipedia.org], and is used by her Eagle Forum [wikipedia.org].

If the ideas presented on that site induce laughter, it is because neoconservative ideas are completely ridiculous. Really, Mark Twain couldn't produce satire so deep. I honestly hope that the GOP uses that site as their definitive reference. Within two generations, they'll be too stupid to breed.

Conservapedia is self-parody, but it is produced and maintained by "Conservatives" as a repository of official "Conservative" dogma. Because they think Wikipedia is "liberal", as they clearly state in their About [conservapedia.com] page. Typically Conservative, they're using the Wikipedia software for free, but don't even mutter a minimal thanks to Wikipedia - they just bash it.

Anonymous Conservative Coward is a typical Conservative: trying to have it both ways, all ways, whenever it's convenient. There is no "truth" for today's "Conservatives" (What are they "conserving"? They're wasters, reckless consumers and rampant destroyers.) So whenever they dart out from behind their favorite weasel words to make a clear statement, they're usually a joke, at least because they contradict whatever other statement they made before that was once convenient then.

You're right, some might be from the Northeast (like Dover, PA for example). So us dumbass, inbred rednecks from Alabama do not have a lock on scientific ignorance and religious idiocy.

Damn, whatever will happen when the Deep South is no longer looked on as the primary source of bible beating, homophobic, racist, ignorant fundies? Unfortunately, when that day happens, it will be the entire US that is looked on as the primary source of bible beating, homophobic, racist, ignorant fundies.

If you read The Ancestor's Tale [amazon.com] by Richard Dawkins, you'll find that recent genetic evidence suggests that many of the distinct branches of modern mammals predate the K-T extinction.

In particular, by the time of the K-T extinction, I believe that the primate lineage had already separated from rodents, as well as the laurasiatheres [wikipedia.org] (all hoofed mammals, lions, tigers, bears, etc.), xenarthrans [slashdot.org] (armadillos, sloths, etc.), and afrotheres [wikipedia.org] (elephants, manatees, anteaters, etc.).

So, while most mammals in the Cretaceous may still have been tiny shrew-like creatures scurrying around in the underbrush, many of the modern lineages had already come into separate existence.

It is also interesting to read, in the book, that our nearest non-primate relatives aside from the tree shrews are rodents. I can sort of see it: give a mouse a little more finger dexterity and it wouldn't not that different from a lemur. It also might explain why rodents are such good laboratory specimens.

While I am a programmer at heart I supposed, I do have a strong interest in biology (amongst other things). I just wanted to add to any geeks out there who have any interest at all in biology, read this book. I found it to be excellent on many levels. I am not here to do a book review, just wanted to say it comes highly recommened from someone *not* in the field. Also, if your in OC (SoCal), I think I saw a flyer that he gave a speech down in Laguna Beach a few months ago. Not sure if he is normally in

>It also might explain why rodents are such good laboratory specimens.See, you're actually assuming that they are good models, whereas it's not clear that they are.Indeed, regardless of how good a model they are, they are rather used because of their size,cost and fewer objections by laity. People want to save the cute bunnies (actually lagomorphs,close cousins of the rodents), but most don't care about the white mice in the cage next to it.And some people object to being compared to monkeys, apes or pig

See, you're actually assuming that they are good models, whereas it's not clear that they are.

Yes, that's true.

It may well be that any old mammal would do, and mice are merely good because they are small (and for breeding purposes, they have a very short generational cycle and large litters).

I suppose what I was trying to suggest was that mice may be particularly good to compare for specific genetic reasons beyond the obvious ones I just mentioned. Though any argument about our particular closeness to mice

Do they think that those steps ever could have taken place if the dinosaurs were still around?

Actually, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a fair amount on this topic, as part of his "contingency" hhypothesis. This is the idea that a fair part of evolutionary development is random and accidental, and if we could reset the clock to an earlier time, things would develop differently.

He viewed the K-T extinction event as a "natural experiment" with this. Before it, there was wide diversity in both dinosaurs and mammals,

> a similar analysis for birds, published recently in the journal Biology Letters, revealed that more than 40 avian lineages survived the mass extinctions. Most paleontologists now think that birds descended from dinosaurs. So in a sense, even dinosaurs in one form escaped the calamity.

not necessarily as a result of the ads, I know about the Government Employees Insurance Corporation, but I neither have it, nor intend on purchasing it. I was suckered by the much more relevant-to-car-insurance ad campaign by Progressive.

He's not lighting MY hundred dollar bills. He put the word geico on my mind, but not in a way that makes me want to actually buy anything from them. If I'm typical, then he's not lighting any dollar bills. If I'm not typical, then most people didn't notice the absurdity of alleged cavemen not actually living in caves; that part of the plan is a failure.

Unless that part of the plan didn't exist, and only happened by accident. Which brings us back to the concept of an idiot savant.

Can it be because there is more selection pressure due to the dinosaurs?If there is more selection pressure, more the chance of diverging to new species.And when dinosaurs died out, the mammals had a field day.

The only 'evolutionist agenda' is a subset of the scientific agenda: to promote the understanding of how the universe works, and to investigate the universe to widen our understanding.The only thing that causes evolutionary theory to stand out as a pariah is that it interferes with the credibility of religion. So it becomes an 'agenda', rather than a subset of biological science to those who are offended by the offense to their imaginary friend.

Yeah, sure. This one species of mammals is totally different from all the rest of them.

Not to bait flames here, but the evidence for divine creation is pretty damned weak if you take into account all the imperfect humans that had to be involved in bringing us 'his word'... while the evidence for evolution is getting stronger all the time, and this little theory of evolution doesn't mind a few corrections here and there. It's a bit tolerant of the process of discovery.

....I'll give you the option for divine creation if you give me the option for evolution.......

The constitution guarantees that you can believe either one or anything else you want. The government is not supposed to prefer one religion above another. However, the evolutionary religion has managed to sell itself as science and illegally gets billions of dollars of tax money. Maybe it is time the ACLU sued the government for supporting religion.

Evolution is a theory of science, not a parlor talk theory. There is no faith in evolution, only vast reams of empirical data supporting it.

That over-states the case rather drastically. First off, there's an awful lot of faith in evolution, and that's actually a point that far too many folks who defend evolution blindly should accept, otherwise they get blindsided with the news that... shock, some corner of the theory was actually wrong.

There's faith in the idea that what we observe is representative of what happened before recorded history. There's faith that empiricism is generally valid (watch how many people leap to defend empiricism and

It all boils down to faith, indeed. Because without it, we would each be forced as individuals to verify and review all of science, and if we had to do that before we could accept it, we'd still be breaking flint into flakes to attach to the end of sticks and hoping it doesn't rain today.

The choice in who to place your faith in is similarly simple. Do I trust millions, consisting of my peers, colleagues, friends, and family with a modern viewpoint and the benefit of education? Or do I trust what by toda

I have recently examined the Marzeah Papyrus (7th century B.C.), fragments of the dead sea scrolls, septuagint leviticus , septuagint exodus and Gospel of John fragments all from the 3rd century A.D. Modern, nonparaphrased, versions of the Bible, corresponding to these fragments are accurately translated.Many of the original writers and earliest translators could write and speak multiple languages. While you might consider them superstitious they weren't illiterate. William Tyndale, a 16th century sc

I think the point was that the ORIGINAL texts (of which the, admitedly ancient text you refer to are mere copies) are lost to history. We'll never know if they're quite the same as what we're looking at, and certainly the Catholic church had a couple of rounds of eliminating books that they considered to be non-canon... and when I say eliminating, I mean hunting down every copy and burning them.As for the literacy thing... you're correct insofar as the new testament goes, but the OT is another matter. Many

"Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.":)

Until the next "re-thinking." Will we ever have hard evidence, or just thought experiments?

But we do have hard evidence - indeed it was hard evidence that helped lead to this rethinking. Recently there have been a number of finds of surprisingly large mammals that are much older than had previously been expected. They include a beaver like (pre)-mammal [wikipedia.org] from the Jurassic that was almost half a metre long, discovered in 2004, and two species large carnivorous mammal from the cretaceous [wikipedia.org] (dated to about 130 million years ago - or 65 million years prior to the dinosaur extenction) which were discovered in 2000 and 2005. Such large mammals (relatively speaking) during the time of the dinosaurs draws into question the previous belief that mammals were restricted to small rat/mouse like scavengers at that time. Instead we see evidence of large, active, meat eating mammals. This implies that mammals were rather less marginalised during the dinosaurs "reign" than previously thought, and imples that mammal evolutionary history needs to be rethought accordingly.

I should add that these fossil discoveries lead to various people taking a more serious look at the presumed facts of mammal evolution and were the catalyst for a "rethink", however there is even more "hard evidence" in the paper cited by the NYT article which was a far more detailed study looking at far more fossil (and apparently molecular) evidence.

Recently there have been a number of finds of surprisingly large mammals that are much older than had previously been expected. They include a beaver like (pre)-mammal from the Jurassic that was almost half a metre long, discovered in 2004,/.../

I'm neither a evolutionary biologist nor a paleontologist, but hopefully one of the people reading this is (or at least claims to be on Wikipedia) and can answer a question for me:I was always under the impression that the reason it was presumed small rodents were the only ones to exist with the dinosaurs is because if they were any larger, they would've been wiped out by the K-T extinction event. If there were large mammals that existed with the dinosaurs, and if they were in the same distinct groups that

I'm no expert, but it would appear that the surprise is, in fact, that some of these larger specimens actually survived. It's been known for some time that primates diverged about 69 million years ago, for example, and it seems that more orders are being added to the list.

It wasn't clear from the article, but I assumed that the large existing mammals and birds died off as well. What the article stated was the the lineages already had split. So there was a proto-primate and other proto groups. The actually surviving species may have been quite small though.

By reading NYT articles? Is that where you get all your scientific facts?

No, but it was linked in the main article and gave a reasonably accurate synopsis of the Nature article. Nature has an abstract [nature.com] of the article on their website, but you must be a paying subscriber to read the full article online, which few/.ers are, I assume. You can read the full text at any university library and at many public libraries. Which of these do you plan to do to confirm your original statement?

Science is often championed as being very sure... especially evolution,

I'm calling you on this rediculous statement. Science is only as sure as they can prove. You'll hardly find a scientist who, under new evidence or studies, will say "nope, the way we used to believe is more correct, and i'll be damned if i take your new evidence into consideration!"
Sounds more like religion to me.

A valid question. That evolution happens is a known fact. That animals adapt over the generations and change to the point that disparate isolated populations can no longer interbreed is a fact. What is constantly being reevaluated is the actual mechanisms that drive this change. Early assumptions are reexamined when they don't hold up to scrutiny. Theories are revised when we discover that things are more complex than we thought. Natural selection (higher survival potential) does not explain creatures

Does it raise questions in no one else's mind when it is quite consistently being "rethought?" It seems it should not be dogmatically asserted as it is now, nor should a "rethinking" be taken in stride as if it's entirely normal behavior for science. And yes, I know it's not a scientific fact, it is a scientific theory, as most scientific thoughts are - but most school kids don't know much of the difference between "fact" and "scientific theory." It's simply taught...Maybe informative materials should be re-evaluated when the theory itself is re-evaluated.

I think we should be clear on what is being re-thought here. The theory of evolution itself, that variation and descent, combined with selective pressure, will lead to complex organisms with the appearance of design, is not being rethought. The theory that evolution via natural selection is responsible for the diversity of species of life on earth is not being rethought. All that is being rethought is the particular history regarding the evolution of mammals. That the theory of evolution can be used to exp

but most school kids don't know much of the difference between "fact" and "scientific theory."

That's because there isn't a difference. When you say "theory", the scientific term that most matches it is "hypothesis". "Scientific theory" means "fact". At least, as far as translating technical scientific jargon into vernacular is concerned, that's how it is.

Your analogy of a freak accident isn't far wrong. It is a mistake to think of evolution as a planned process. That's where a lot of creationists try to poke holes in it by saying "what's the use of half an eye" The argument makes the assumption that an eye was the intended goal, but there was no intention.It goes like this. Animal A and animal B are attacked by animal C. Animal A has some cells on its skin that are light sensitive, even if only a tiny bit. Neither A B or C have eyes, so animal A escapes bec

... a lot of creationists try to poke holes in it by saying "what's the use of half an eye"...

It's perhaps worth mentioning that in the past couple years, researchers have discovered a very early stage of a "half eye" that has been developing for only around a millions years or so. Google for "brittle-star eye" to read about it.

It's pretty clear that this new eye is of survival value to the starfish that have it, although it is barely able to resolve anything. Its angular resolution is only around a degr

alas putting the argument initially in such a confrontational way doesn't help.

You need to get them to really debate. Most won't, and spout the same stuff over and over.

Thing is, two centuries ago everyone was a creationist, we would have been as well, there was no alternative. They are however fighting a losing battle if you look at the numbers. It will likely be another century before creationism is dead, and then only maybe.

My problem is understanding why the creationists are so obsessed with evolution being wrong. After all, Heliocentrism vs. Geocentrism has all the same merits (i.e. we can see the sun goes round the earth, proving the opposite to the layman is difficult, Heliocentrism is a theory, literal interpretation of the bible says the arth is the centre of the solar system), biut doesn't cause nearly as much debate.

If non creationists were wrong, it would be that there was another scientific reason for evolution, or, as with what happened with Newtons work in Einstein's time, it could turn out that evolution/natural selection alone are woefully inadequate explanations.We would absorb the new information, reprint our textbooks and move on, no worries.

If a creationist is proved wrong then the very basis of their personal world view or power base (if they are considered to have authority due to their assertion of their v

There's mathematics and physics around geocentrism. Math cannot be disproven and physics is much harder to argue against (like the pinciples of centripetal force, momentum, and gravity for example). For example, how does one account for the seasons and the position of the sun in the sky during those seasons in a heliocentric model? One cannot. If the world is spherical or near spherical, the sun cannot revolve around the earth in the way a spring might (because the period of one "solar revolution" doesn't c